Don't Miss

• Morrison's Gift Picks
• Holiday Catalog 2009
• NYRB Classics: Save 30%
• Paperback Favorites
  for Book Groups
• Springer Math Sale!
• Subscribe to Indiespensable

More at Powell's

• Featured Signed Editions
• Rare and Collectible Books
• eBooks | Audio | DVDs | Blu-ray

Abash'd the Devil Stood

1. 
   $10.49 Sale Trade Paper add to wish list

   The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

   Jesse Bullington

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Book News Annotation:

Synopsis:

About the Author

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!

Average customer rating based on 1 comment:

Ronald Scheurer, November 29, 2009 (view all comments by Ronald Scheurer)
BOOK REVIEW: Modern Liberty and The Limits of Government, Charles Fried, 2007.

According to popular Christian myths, Adam was the first person on the earth, and thus the first and only person who had total freedom and liberty to act as he wished. Then along came Eve.

Suppose it had been the other way around. Eve came first, Adam second; and it was Adam who most often said, “Not tonight, I have a headache.” Not only did Adam and Eve have different perspectives on what the rules should be, but their God creator had a few thoughts of his own.

As the population increased, some presumed and/or elected leaders interpreted common sense rules about useful behavior. Philosophy began. Other presumed leaders, a priestly class, more adamant about the rules, tightened them. Religion began.

Charles Fried’s Modern Liberty considers not only individual liberty, but equal rights for divergent groups of people within a community. He examines the idea of free speech in varying social contexts? And perhaps, more importantly, who or what determines the amount of liberty an individual can enjoy, the rights of that individual vis-à-vis the rights of others, and can those rights be presumed to be equal?

Very often one person’s liberty is counterpoised to another person’s vision of some abstract good. Religious revelations from a God to an individual may offer a fair set of moral rules for communal living, but the commentary by others who reinterpret those rules often ends up restricting an individual’s liberty without just cause. This happens when an individual’s choices are restricted in some way under the threat of coercive or punitive action against them.

One can always change religions in a democracy, but what happens where a national government
is a theocratic state where non-believers are persecuted in one way or another by a minority? Fried asks “Who Imposes on whom?”

Fried explores in considerable detail of the need for both physical and mental space in which to express one’s individual liberty, and how the rights of one individual may or may not be perceived to interfere with the liberty of someone else. By contract rights can be bought or sold. But, when those rights are bought and sold under duress, who or what will protect the victim of that coercion?

Enter government and the rule of law; however, there is little to keep the government from reshuffling the deck when equitability ceases to flavor the power elite. Enter liberty of the mind.

Fried extends the discussion. Freedom of the mind, the liberty to speak and express thoughts requires some element of physical space and material possession to do so. Governments can and do dash this liberty by curtailing publishers, broadcasters, and individual speakers from the facilities needed to reach their respective audience, but the consensus of the governed is, or should be, that governments protect these liberties. It may very well be that governments are not the most effective engine of tyranny over people’s lives.

Cited in Modern Liberty is Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments Oxford University Press (1974) where the tyranny of a parent over a son’s efforts to free his own mind is explored. Finally, as Fried puts it, one also has to “struggle with the inertia of one’s own mind.”

RAS (11/30/09)

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No

report this comment

Product Details

ISBN:

9780393060003

Subtitle:

And the Limits of Government

Author:

Fried, Charles

Publisher:

W. W. Norton & Company

Subject:

State, the

Subject:

Liberty

Subject:

Political Freedom & Security - Civil Rights

Edition Description:

Norton Hardcover

Series:

Issues of Our Time

Publication Date:

November 2006

Binding:

Hardcover

Grade Level:

General/trade

Language:

English

Illustrations:

Y

Pages:

217

Dimensions:

8 x 6 in